On Jun 11, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Simon Wilkinson wrote:
On 11 Jun 2009, at 20:18, David Boyes wrote:
So mark the ones you know of as "used by differing parties" and
give the folks who want a new field a new one so things can
actually progress.
It's the lack of 'a new one' that is the issue. There are no free
fields in the RPCs we are interested in once you discard those
fields that are 'used by differing parties'.
. . .
That proposal requires that RPC changes (which in effect this is, as
it changes the semantics of a particular field) go through a
standardisation process that we're just getting off the ground. In
the future this means that there will be an avenue for those who
wish to register an unused field for their own use to do so.
However, the future isn't the issue - it's the past we have to
contend with. For many years, there has been a free for all on the
unused fields and bits in the AFS protocol. This means that any use
of them has to be carefully considered. I suspect that our only way
forwards is going to be to (as David H. suggests) revise the
protocol, and then make very clear that unused fields are not
'spare', but 'reserved'.
I kind of like having two types of fields - some reserved, to be used
for officially blessed things as we're discussing, and some
specifically designated for local use. In this particular case there
may not be enough fields/bytes to allow this, but we should at least
keep the idea in mind.
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